ASU Hockey: After ACL tear and back injury, Steenn Pasichnuk looks to make comeback

(Photo: Gabrielle Mercer/WCSN)

A puck shot behind the net leads to a battle of control between Steenn Pasichnuk and a Penn State player. The skate of the Nittany Lion catches Pasichnuk’s and takes it with him while his other stayed planted. The planted leg snaps and down goes Pasichnuk.

He tore his ACL.

Luckily for Pasichnuk, it wasn’t a full tear so surgery was not needed during the offseason. His ACL was only 75 percent torn, Pasichnuk said, meaning that a portion was still attached so it could grow back together.

“With knee injuries, we need to look at how strong is his quad and muscles surrounding the knee,” ASU strength and conditioning coach Garnet Exelby said.

Strengthening the muscle has been key in his recovering process thanks to help last season from Exelby and former head athletic trainer Chad Walker.

Pasichnuk continues to wear a brace every day and will have to wear one for the next two to three years.

“I don’t think about it too much, maybe just after coming off the injury, coming back to play,” Pasichnuk said. “It was in my mind a lot. I was a little skittish to do things , but after skating on it for four months now, I don’t even think about it much. The brace is there to do what it’s supposed to do and it’s good. I’m not afraid to go anywhere or do anything with it now.”

The Bonnyville, Alberta native didn’t let his injury become an excuse for him to avoid practicing on his own during the offseason. Pasichnuk spent a month-and-a-half back home working out on his own time to make sure he could have the talent that brought him to Tempe in the first place.

“I did a lot of leg work trying to strengthen it,” he said. “I was skating when I could because back in my hometown, they take the ice out and it’s not in all the time so I kind of have to drive to go and skate so I skated when I could.”

Pasichnuk returned to ASU in July and began skating once again with the team.

Each summer, ASU hockey has a 45-day training camp to prepare the Sun Devils for what is to come in the forthcoming season. After nursing his ACL back to health, Pasichnuk returned to practice.

But this time, he sustained a lower back injury.

“Originally, we thought it was just muscle soreness,” Pasichnuk said. “I just kept pushing through and I kept getting worse and worse and worse.”

In August, he finally told his trainer he thought something wrong which led to an MRI showing the right-winger had two bulging discs in his lower back and an ambulated tear in one of his discs.

“The easiest way to sum it up is athletes in general, especially hockey players, almost every hockey player on a team is playing injured in some way,” Exelby said. “Athletes are masters on compensation so they’ll just figure out a way to do it that hurts less badly, but they’ll still kind of do it. At least with my background as a hockey player, I can tell with a little intuition, if you want to call it that, what’s happening, if they’re trying to hide something, if they don’t wanna be pulled out of the lineup or they just want to battle through it.”

It wasn’t until Pasichnuk started to do squats where he really began questioning the pain, claiming that the bar was putting so much pressure on his spine; that moment is when he believed the discs in his back started bulging.

Pasichnuk took time off from training with the team to work out on his own, again to strengthen the muscles around his injury.

According to ASU head coach Greg Powers, since Pasichnuk hasn’t had the training his teammates has had this summer, he is out of shape. He was out of state when ASU hosted UMass and Powers said he looked better against Air Force last weekend.

Powers has since moved Pasichnuk from his native center position to a winger spot.

“It eases his responsibility up a little bit,” Powers said. “He doesn’t have to skate as much.”

Pasichnuk hasn’t played much of the position in over a year. He was actively a winger when he played in the juniors for the AJHL’s Bonnyville Pontiacs.

Pasichnuk is happy that one of his fellow linemates is Filips Buncis, who was also a center by trade before being moved to a wing position so they could fill in for one another in the situation that one is missing.

The biggest challenge he faces on the ice now getting used to where he needs to be now. It takes mental preparation before games, visualizing different circumstances he could potentially be in as a winger off of situations, such as face-offs, he said.

The recovery process has been long for Pasichnuk, but in a few weeks he is hoping to be back to where he once was. Pasichnuk credits teammates Louie Rowe and Austin Lemieux for helping him with extra skating drills and support.

“Just feeling a little bit slow,” he said. “I’m just trying to do whatever I can to get back up to par with everyone.”